Today I and a group of students launched a balloon satellite. These are small boxes with science experiments that are launched tethered from a weather balloon and go to near 100,000 feet (We hit 102,000 feet). We also designed our satellite to look like the companion cube, so I thought I would share some pictures.

Our main experiment was to see how extreme cold effects flash memory (It doesn't apparently).

I always wonder, though - don't authorities frown upon stuff like that? Nevermind the danger of random people getting splattered by Companion Cubes at high velocity - but also planes and helicopters sucking that thing into their engines and stuff. I bet you need to have some paperwork to do before you can send up such a balloon.

I always wonder, though - don't authorities frown upon stuff like that? Nevermind the danger of random people getting splattered by Companion Cubes at high velocity - but also planes and helicopters sucking that thing into their engines and stuff. I bet you need to have some paperwork to do before you can send up such a balloon.

School worked with a organization called Edge of Space Sciences. They get all the FAA paperwork done, and we launch in a rural area (In this case near Windsor, Colorado). They also do wind predictions to make sure it wont stray south into Denver's airspace. It landed about 100 miles from where we launched it near the Colorado, Nebraska border.

And it was a video, I just haven't gone through it all yet, and it was spinning a lot on the way up and down. That one picture I have is several seconds after the balloon burst and is a picture of the bottom of the balloon.

Very cool! How difficult is it for a layman to put together something that goes up into space like that?

Not hard if you take a class at a school that does it for the launch part. There are a lot of logistics in the launch and recovery phase.

The box itself was pretty simple. Ours was made out of foam core, with foam insulation on the inside. Plastic tube in the middle to guide the rope they use to string it all up. We had a small electric heater inside made from a few resistors, that seemed to work quite well.

Not hard if you take a class at a school that does it for the launch part. There are a lot of logistics in the launch and recovery phase.

The box itself was pretty simple. Ours was made out of foam core, with foam insulation on the inside. Plastic tube in the middle to guide the rope they use to string it all up. We had a small electric heater inside made from a few resistors, that seemed to work quite well.

How do you recover it? How far away from the launch site did it land or were you able to somehow control the descent?

How do you recover it? How far away from the launch site did it land or were you able to somehow control the descent?

The group that launches it has two beacons (at the top and bottom of the string) and has remote equipment in the car. THey have software to use current winds to predict track with sufficient accuracy, so shortly after launch we started driving to where we expected it to land. Out landed about 100 miles from where we launched it. Here was the prediction model before launch.